


The Most Indispensable Man

by stackcats



Category: Sherlock (TV), The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Light Bondage, M/M, Oral Fixation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-25 16:59:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stackcats/pseuds/stackcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Goolding Inquiry, Malcolm Tucker gathers up what's left of his dignity and asks an old flame for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Key

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written in about three years. I've no idea why I've written it except that it was better out than in.

A thin drizzle slants through the white glow of the streetlamps standing sentinel along the broad, tree-lined street, giving the night a slick and grimy and artificial feel.

 

Or maybe that’s just London, oozing into the air and mixing with the rain vapour, making its ancient, monstrous night-time self unavoidably known. Getting into Malcolm’s lungs, making him feel like the taut string of a fighting kite, tightly wound and knotted with glass.

 

The city is an enormous fucking _beast_ , he’d long ago decided, an entity somehow older, nastier, and even more jaded than he was, even more exhausted than he felt. Over the millennia it had done things even he, the fearsome Malcolm Tucker, wasn’t capable of, it had seen things he couldn’t know, had imagined things even his most degraded, twisted, blackest thoughts couldn’t conceive. It hadn’t birthed or raised him, but it had taken him as its own. _London_. Even Glasgow’s darkest moments couldn’t compare to the shit that’d happened here.

 

Perhaps that was why he’d ended up here. He’d sold his soul to the demon _London_ and now there would be no going back, no redemption, not for him. He was a part of it now. He’d shaped it, though not nearly as much as it had shaped him. And now it was turning on him, lips snarled back and teeth bared, ready to strike and snatch him up and swallow him whole, digest him alive as he bellowed and fought and tried to claw his way out of the dark...

 

He paces before the towering Georgian townhouse, footsteps muffled in the urban night. His shadow splits and separates as he passes beneath the streetlamp’s glare, four stretched and warped phantom Malcolms torn into the light and then vanished and gone when he crosses to the other side of the street. He stares up at the dark windows, tall and evenly spaced, framed in white against the worn red brick of the building’s façade.

 

His lip curls into a silent snarl, fists clenched at his sides, as a silver Ford Focus, the most generic car on the planet, swishes past raising up a mist of piss-weak spray in its wake. It takes the corner without indicating then rumbles out of earshot, the silence reasserting itself alarmingly fast.

 

He paces back across the road again, strides up the steps, and freezes with his hand half-raised towards the buzzer, which he glares at as if it’s uttered a personal insult against him.

 

_No,_ he decides. He won’t, and he can’t, and he isn’t going to. He spins abruptly on his heel, trots down the steps, and marches swiftly back across the street.

 

Then he stops, hands in pockets, spinning round to glare at the house again before growling in frustration and striding half-way back across the road. He halts near the faded white line, and stands uncomfortably for a moment, fury mounting at his own state of indecision.

 

He should (a little voice in the back of his head insists) do it. He should at least _try_. After all, the world is about to end and what does he have left to lose?

 

But he can’t. Can he?

 

No. Fuck him, the great fat parsnip-shaped Oxbridge _twat_. Fuck him and his enormous house and his, and his, and his fucking _hedgerows_. How dare he live somewhere so unrelentingly decadent that it makes anyone visiting feel like a delivery boy.  Not that Malcolm feels like a delivery boy, no… maybe a fucking beggar, or a debtor or…

 

“Bastard,” he growls. It relieves his tension only a little, so he semi-consciously follows it up with, “Blimp-sized wank-stain of a badger-buggering cunt…” He’s oblivious to the car that glides past behind him, the driver gesticulating out of the window at the apparently sober man in an expensive suit, talking to himself in the middle of the road.

 

He’s on the verge of turning his back and walking to the opposite pavement again in an attempt to gain some perspective when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He fishes it out.

 

The text message reads:

         _Please do come up. I presume you still have your key._

 

Malcolm looks up at the house, where not a light shines from a single window, not a curtain twitches, not a shadow moves.

 

He’d long since forgotten about it, small, scuffed, and nondescript among all the others on his chain, but he does still have the key.


	2. "My Hands Are Tied"

The house hasn’t changed – and why should it? Its occupant seldom does. Not a single thing in the entrance hall has moved or been replaced, and as he climbs the stairs it’s possible, for a long moment, to imagine the previous ten years have never happened, that he’s coming home from work on a Friday evening, that he’ll be greeted with a devilish grin and an exchange of boasts and a night of the most aggressive, unapologetic chess he’s ever had. A game each night, no rematches, no mercy. Sometimes he even won.  He’d won more and more frequently towards the end, though he doesn’t care to wonder what that might represent if analysed professionally - while he technically _has_ a therapist, her main purpose in his life is to provide a steady and legal supply of benzodiazepines, and the subject of his sex life is one he strongly discourages her from broaching. No doubt she finds that interesting of itself. He doesn’t give a shit, the benzos and the four-and-a-half hours sleep they grant him each night are the only reason he isn’t legally one of the undead.

 

Up the plush carpeted stairs, his footfalls silent, his breath held in his throat as though he still thinks he has some chance of going un-noticed. He passes an eclectic mix of artwork (surrealist, renaissance, impressionist, modern…), all of it genuine and original, much of it on permanent loan from the National Gallery. Malcolm couldn’t give a badger’s fart about any of it, but he’s well aware that any given piece is worth more than everything he owns put together. Out of a few scraps of canvas and some cheap oil paint, these grand masters constructed fortunes and legacies. And now here it all hangs, in this innocent-looking house in this unremarkable street, looked upon by a very, very select few people.

 

At the top of the stairs the landing is dark, but the library door stands invitingly ajar.  Malcolm sticks his hands in his pockets, huffs out a breath, and invites himself inside.

 

This isn’t the main library, Malcolm had discovered years ago. The main library occupies an entire building on the other side of town – no, this is just the everyday section, the two thousand or so volumes that are most likely to be relevant or interesting on a day-to-day basis, by the standards of the house’s sole occupant. There’s nothing particularly remarkable here; a wall of fiction, a few airtight glass cabinets containing original handwritten manuscripts, a shelf full of variously bound pages that the Vatican might be quite interested to know about… but the really interesting stuff, well – Malcolm had never been given _that_ key.

 

There’s a rug in the centre of the floor with an ugly but vacant loveseat positioned on it. A low table sits by the window, a couple of over-stuffed armchairs either side of it, but there’s no sign of anybody sitting there except for a bottle of 30 year-old Talisker on the table, and one glass. Malcolm cracks open the seal, pours himself a generous few fingers of peppery-sweet gold, and raises a toast to the empty room.

 

“To playing irritating fucking mind-games,” he snarls, doing a little 180-turn on his heel as he throws back half the glass in one swallow.

 

A voice from the shadowy history section answers; “Slàinte.”

 

“And in English we say cram it up your pockmarked arse.”

 

Mycroft Holmes steps into the light.

 

Mycroft himself _has_ changed, somewhat superficially. Still the same easy grace, the same enigmatic half-smile, even – Malcolm can tell from the buttons and the collar of his charcoal-grey suit – the same fucking tailor. Still neat as a polished pin. There’s just somewhat… _less_ of him.

 

The fingers of his left hand curl around his own glass of water, his knuckles white, betraying a rare flush of actual human emotion. The pain in his expression as he regards Malcolm is as genuine as it’s ever going to get.

 

“I was,” Mycroft begins, his voice soft and low and precise, “rather perversely, hoping this turn of events would bring you to my home. It’s been too long.”

 

“Has it,” Malcolm intones. He drains his glass, puts it back on the table where he found it, shoves his hands into his pockets again to keep himself from any impulses to strangle this man. All the old grief has started boiling up to the surface again, just from being here in this house, with _him._

 

Mycroft gestures towards the table. “Please do help yourself to another drink.”

 

Malcolm raises his eyebrows. “Not having one yourself, no? Too many fucking calories in it for you, is that it? Because you are, you know, looking like an otter-shaped dildo in Armani, which I’m sure you’ll go ahead and take as a fucking compliment.”

 

“Or as close as I’ll get from you this side of the Infernal ice-age.”

 

Mycroft drops himself gracefully onto the loveseat and hooks his right leg over his left knee. The seat is one of those awful ones that look like conjoined armchairs facing in opposite directions, designed so you could sit and gaze into each other’s eyes. Mycroft gestures to the other half of the seat; Malcolm bares his teeth in a sneer and leans against a bookshelf instead.

 

You could, if you were inclined to cliché, cut the atmosphere with a blade. Mycroft might look like the epitome of English gentility, but if he felt like it he could have Malcolm vanish, quite literally, off the face of the planet. Not a journalist would report his disappearance, not a soul would know what had happened to him. It is by no means hyperbole to say that Mycroft Holmes is one of the most dangerous men in the country – which had been the original attraction, many years ago. Malcolm had rather enjoyed the idea of such a lethal mind tucked neatly away inside the most unintimidating body imaginable. It was why he’d stuck around for almost five years, and it’s why he’s returned tonight.

 

He draws in a ragged breath, drops his head, forces out a lopsided smile and a dark chuckle. He isn’t going to get anywhere unless he provides some reason for Mycroft to give anything resembling a flying fuck.

 

“Sorry.” He nearly chokes on the word, but there it is, out in the air between them, quavering like a sick moth. “I… I’m sorry, Mycroft, that’s just colossally fucking rude of me, you invite me into your home and I get all defensive like a badger asked to take a fucking chest x-ray. Let’s start again, shall we? Actually here – I brought you a gift. It’s a Kit Kat. Limited edition one made with white chocolate and unicorn gizz, here, take it.”

 

Mycroft graciously accepts the slightly squashed platitude and tucks it into his inside pocket with a smile. “How thoughtful.”

 

Malcolm finds himself pacing in front of the bookshelves, hands out in reluctant suppliance. His feet have forgotten how to stay the fuck still, he’s so full of nervous energy if he doesn’t keep moving he might die from internal haemorrhaging. Not only is setting a foot wrong with Mycroft highly fucking dangerous – and he put several feet wrong with him a number of years ago – but there’s Jamie to consider. Jamie who has no idea Mycroft is even a person, Jamie with his mad eyes and permanently bruised lips, who has recently waltzed the fuck back into his life and will roar the fuck back out of it again with a fistful of Malcolm’s internal organs and all his remaining dignity if he so much as catches a whiff of a fart of a rumour that Malcolm’s been visiting with an old flame. Not that Jamie scares him. Fuck _that_. But he does have his all organs the way he likes them, namely on the inside, and he’s running pretty low on dignity these days. Nothing much left to spare.

 

“Look,” He says, coming to an abrupt halt slightly off to Mycroft’s left, between him and the door. “I… I almost didn’t come over here, but if there’s a chance, if there’s any chance you don’t completely hate me – and you don’t, do you, because we’re actually alone here, no Anthea breathing down my neck, no giant abominable fucking ape-man enforcers waiting to escort me out the fifth floor window or into a shiny black car – “ Mycroft’s distasteful expression is a testimony to how much of a lying cuntbag bastard he can be – “and so I’ll just get it out there. I need your help.”

 

Mycroft sits motionless for a long moment, his fingers steepled together, his lips slightly pursed. It would be a bad idea to make eye contact, to stare at him for too long, so Malcolm helps himself to another drink from the bottle by the window and makes it a triple. This could very well be the last bottle of expensive scotch he’ll be seeing in quite some time.

 

“C’mon,” he looks over at Mycroft again, the other man watching him with a strange sort of sadness in his eyes, “there’s got to be something you can do, some arse you can kick, some cock you can tickle. You’re _you_ , man! You exert influence over people who don’t even know you exist! I’ve heard Prime Ministers call you ‘ _sir’_! You can – “

 

“Make this whole unpleasant business go away?”

 

Malcolm throws out his arms, scotch splattering across the oak floor. “I’m not a wee ignorant pants-pissing _child,_ Mycroft! I’m not standing here thinking, well this is a right cock-up, better get old Mycroft to wave his magic fucking wand and take us back to yesterday morning so I can remember not fist myself to death! I’m well aware this is bad – I haven’t seen anything worse since Jamie caught his balls in an inkjet printer. That’s why I’m here. There’s got to be something you can do to avert the zombie fucking apocalypse of my career and perhaps steer things gently round to more of an entropic heat-death of the universe sort of finale. Something a bit more fucking dignified than the shitstorm that’s about to hit, you know? And when I say shitstorm, I’m talking shit hailstones the size of bowling balls, I’m talking diarrhoea rain, Mycroft, I’m talking hurricane force winds that smell worse than the Thames in summer at low tide. Do you really want to see that happen? The man I knew - the man I, I fucking _loved_ , okay? - would not sit on his fat arse and just watch it all come to pass on TV and do _fuck all_ to stop it. ”

 

The L-word was going too far, he knew it as he said it. The three-letter eff-word hasn’t helped either. Mycroft has gone grey as arsenic, his face expressionless. He uncrosses his legs, crosses them again the other way, flexes and cracks the knuckles of one hand. If Malcolm can read Mycroft – which he can – he might have just reached the man.

 

He twists the knife in as deep as he dares, wondering if there’s any blood left to be drawn.

 

“I just… ah fuck, I should never have…” He rubs a hand across his gaunt, pale face, shakes his head. “I just hoped that you…  maybe there was a chance that you still…”

 

“Ah, my dear fellow…” Mycroft leans forward, something dangerous in his expression. “My wolf in sheepish clothing…“

 

“I’m being sincere! I have never, in my life, been more-“

 

“Then you’re begging me, Malcolm.”

 

“Yes, alright, all fucking _right_ , I’m begging you, I am, because you have the power, you can prevent this from being pursued, you-“

 

“What power I have, I have used already.”

 

A beat passes between them; Malcolm looking up at Mycroft from under raised brows, and Mycroft delicately averting his eyes, gazing at the polished floorboards off to his right.

 

“The government’s interests are my interests. Not vice-versa.”

 

“That is irrelevant-“

 

“I want only what is best for the realm.”

 

“No. No, no n-“

 

“My dear, you are no longer what is best for the realm. Therefore my hands are tied.”

 

It hits Malcolm like a drunk driver doing 50 round a corner in a school zone – not that Mycroft _won’t_ but that his clockwork mind believes he _can’t_ … His throat is closing up, his mind is spinning drunkenly away, hopeless as a lost hubcap across the M25. He thinks his knees might give way, but even as the notion of giving in occurs to him he’s surging forward, his empty glass tossed across the room, shattering into a billion incandescent pieces in the lamplight. Mycroft doesn’t flinch. Malcolm decides he’s going to throttle him.

 

Mycroft’s tie is blue Armani silk, and Malcolm figures fuck it, since he’s going to prison anyway - he lunges right for it, bony fingers grasping, a new surge of admiration for this fuck-awful punctured beach-ball of a man as he realises that is the exact fucking tie he awkwardly presented to Mycroft one Christmas – the first Christmas, in fact, the decision to just fucking get something, wrap it up, and give it to him spurred by the conversation they’d had – Malcolm half-jokingly enticing Mycroft to give his rising career an extra leg-up, Mycroft admitting he would, gladly, if Malcolm was in any fathomable way in need of the assistance…

 

Mycroft does that thing all chronically lazy people occasionally pull out of the bag and moves _fast_ , catches Malcolm’s wrists in his hands, just about holding him back. They’re close enough that if he wanted to, Malcolm could still just fucking _bite_ the big twat’s noise off and spit it back at his face, but the memory of that Christmas – hot mulled wine, an open fire, and pissed-out-of-his-skull sex at three in the afternoon – has tripped him up like a shoe left carelessly at the top of the staircase, and now he’s plummeting straight down, third-degree carpet burn and a broken collar bone in his imminent future.

 

When he can find it in him to force out a few sounds, they are shaped rather like; “You’ve finished me.”

 

Mycroft wrinkles his noise against the bile and flying spittle. “You finished yourself.”

 

“You _could_ have done something, but you had it in for me-“

 

“I would have done anything for you, through all these years, had you asked. But you framed yourself. You were careless and stupid. The man I knew – the man I loved – was neither of those things.”

 

Malcolm snarls, blind fury making a fresh surge through his veins. “Oh so I’m not allowed to be fucking _human_ now, is that it? One mistake the size of Julius Nicholson’s microscopic wee Tic-tac dick and I’m on the scrapheap, that’s really fucking _fair_ given the amount of fuck-ups every other cunt’s allowed – Is this my punishment, eh, is that wha-”

 

Mycroft does The Thing Malcolm Hates, the thing where the merest roll of his eyes can snap Malcolm’s mouth shut mid-rant. Malcolm grinds his teeth, the pressure of all his anger building up behind them instead of spewing forth as it ought to.

 

“It was,” Mycroft says delicately, “a rather large mistake, even in the scheme of things. And you underestimate Lord Nicholson quite significantly.”

 

Mycroft hasn’t let go of him. Another thing Malcolm contemplates he could do is surge forward and nut him, the old Glasgow kiss, but his own skull is an unwrapped kinder egg on an August afternoon, and he doesn’t think he’d come out of that well at all, though perhaps it’d be worth it to make Mycroft bleed all over his priceless suit – break his nose so badly he won’t ever underestimate Malcolm again, won’t be able to get the thought and feel of him out of his head, make him regret – regret _everything_ , from the first time Mycroft made eye contact with him right up to and including that extremely ill-advised correction about Julius – he’s going to have to scrub the inside of his skull with bleach to forget that piece of information. He focuses back on his need to get his hands on Mycroft, to grab hold of him, to… shit, fuck, no…

 

He jerks back, freeing his wrists from Mycroft’s grip. Does a rapid lap of the space between the seat and the window, within the glow of the lamplight, and snatches up the whisky, drinks straight from the bottle. He’s not drunk, why isn’t he drunk, why did he try and do this sober? His blood’s on fire, but not in a good way. No, most very definitely in a bad way. He doesn’t look back, he _never_ looks back. The past stays in the past. He barely even talks to his mam any more, or his siblings, the life they were part of is so long ago and far away – and so was this life, his life here with this man. So very long ago. Until now.

 

He did this to himself as well.

 

Mycroft is up, jacket dropped over the arm of the seat leaving him in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, moving with that languorous apex-predator saunter of his. Malcolm watches him in the black of the window, the darkness outside and the lamp within creating an untrustworthy mirror flecked with a thousand night-time lights, the many eyes of the demon London, watching them, patient as the stars. Mycroft stops just behind him, slightly to his right, lidded gaze fixed on his throat. No doubt looking for signs of stress or exhaustion or…

 

“You know what you must do, of course.”

  
Malcolm nods. “I’ve got a good lawyer, don’t you fucking worry about that, pal.”

 

“There are things I _can_ do. I can see to your comfort.”

 

“Lawyer can do that.”

 

“Not to the extent I can. You won’t even know you’re incarcerated. I, naturally, will not be able to visit, and from what I hear of your young man, well… you could be lonely. Bored, even. I can see to it you are adequately taken care of in many respects.”

 

“I don’t get lonely.”

 

“But you do get bored.”

 

Malcolm resents the jab at Jamie, because it’s true. There’s no chance in hell the little shit will go anywhere near a prison voluntarily, same way rats don’t go visiting their pals in the research lab. But that is absolutely none of Mycroft’s business, so Malcolm covers his irritation with a head-shake and a bark of a laugh.

 

“Are you expecting me to thank you?”

 

“You never have before.”

 

“You smug cu-“

 

Mycroft bites him, softly, on his earlobe. The expletive dies on Malcolm’s tongue, his eyelids flickering, a savage pain jolting through his chest from the area he vaguely recalls keeping his heart once, before a trilobite crawled in there, died, and fossilised over millions of years. But the pain is gone as quickly as it came on. There’s a hand on his waist, familiar warmth against his back.

 

“We never did talk,” Mycroft murmurs, “about what happened. Perhaps things could have been different had we spoken to one another.”

 

“No.” Malcolm’s fingers curl at his sides, hesitating for the merest moment before reaching back, finding cool cloth, the hardness of a hip. Just because he doesn’t _like_ the man doesn’t mean he doesn’t _want_ him, doesn’t diminish the gravitational pull Mycroft has on him, drawing him back, inexorably, irresistibly - Malcolm’s pride and his neuroses be damned, this man is the Sagittarius fucking A-star of his space-dust existence, and gravity is nothing if not constant. He’s flown too close, lingered too long. Escape velocity is no longer an option.

 

He says, “It was done. We were done. Couldn’t be undone.”

 

“That’s always been your trouble, denial in the face of the evidence.”

 

“And yours is being a twisted, Machiavellian, unfeeling fucking – ah!” Teeth nip the skin of his neck. He grabs at cloth, arches back, tugs Mycroft closer against him as he forces out the rest of the insult. “Robotic… fucking ice-queen…”

 

“You know that isn’t true. If I never cared, would I have been so upset with you in the end?”

 

“Upset?” Malcolm shouts. He turns and grabs Mycroft by the tie, and they’re nose-to-nose again. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten – you had me fucking _kidnapped_! Remember? That’s what you do when you’re upset?  I spent three days being driven around the West Country in the back of one of your fucking sedans with my hands cuffed to the cupholder! I thought you were going through one of your kinky phases, I thought I was actually fucking going somewhere, but no, you were back at home having a quiet weekend and occasionally wanking to the thought of me trapped in a car with a couple o’ your hired goons, living on Red Bull and service station scotch eggs. You’re a worse sociopath than the entire fucking cast of Eastenders! The Daily Mail reported I’d had some kind of breakdown and gone into hiding! People thought I’d crawled off and died, for three days-”

 

“You over-reacted then and you’re over-reacting now-“

 

“I didn’t over-react, I _under_ -reacted, Mycroft – over-reacting would have been stealing the nuclear launch codes and obliterating this entire fucking street, anything short of that was seriously fucking restrained! I should’ve fed you your own fat fucking _face!_   I should’ve-“

 

Mycroft stops him mid-flow again, but it’s a version Malcolm hates even more than the little eye-roll of shut-the-fuck-up; Mycroft threads a hand into his hair, pulls him close, and kisses him like they’ll both just die if he ever stops.

 

Malcolm growls against his mouth, hands grabbing at the front of his shirt. His body’s doing the autopilot thing again, although his brain hasn’t got anything useful to contribute whatsoever right now except for a sort of strangled _aaaaaaahhhhhh!_ sound in the back of his skull. He’s kissing back, and it’s the most graceless thing, teeth clashing, hands grabbing at clothes, that hand in his hair moving down to his neck, fingertips exactly where he likes them in the short hairs there, a hiss of pure desire escaping his throat as they break for air.

 

He doesn’t hesitate.

 

He shoves Mycroft up against the nearest bookshelf and bites him, hard, on the jaw before smashing their mouths back together. Everything has gone static and weird, the air in his lungs burning with unspent electricity, and Malcolm knows, he _knows_ this is a really fucking _bad_ idea, that someone is going to want him dead for this, but there’s nothing he can do about it even if he wants to, which he doesn’t. Mycroft grabs his arse, pulling him close, Malcolm fighting against the buttons of that infuriating waistcoat (which he loves because it makes Mycroft look even smoother and sleeker, and which he hates because it’s _in his fucking way_ ) until he’s got it open, pushing it back and off and chucking it across the room. He’s harder than anyone his age has any right to be – and Mycroft acknowledges this with a low moan as Malcolm’s entire body presses up against him, and suddenly they’ve gone from a really fucking unproductive conversation to rutting like teenagers, still dressed and completely desperate for contact, to touch and be touched, to _feel_...

 

He has the sudden, overwhelming desire for Mycroft’s cock in his mouth, which means the belt buckle has replaced the waistcoat as his greatest nemesis – he fumbles a little as Mycroft bites at his lower lip, but then he has Mycroft’s belt and trousers open and a hand on his cock, and even as that little voice in his skull is screaming at him that he’s stupid, that this is happening way too fast (i.e. at any speed faster than _not at all_ ), he’s looking Mycroft in the eye, smirking, and licking his lip.

 

Mycroft catches his chin in his hand, long fingers curling around his jaw preventing him from dropping to his knees, but they both know it’s gone much too far for either of them to have a change of heart (and/or trilobite). Mycroft just mirrors his smirk, kisses him again, and says _bedroom_.


	3. "Something To Remember Me"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not 100% sure on the AO3 rating system, but I think I'm safe with "mature". I've added tags to illustrate what the mature content might be.

Malcolm wakes in the dark a few hours later, and savours the sleep-blurred moment. The horror is going to rush in at any minute, but just for now his brain is flooded with enough melatonin (that most elusive of hormones) that he feels almost comfortable – almost able to believe that wantonly fucking the biggest, nastiest, and most horrifyingly significant of his former lovers was not among the worst ideas his mind has ever synthesised, as he assumes it does, from the coffee, alcohol, and fruit he almost exclusively fuels it with. He nuzzles into the pillow, stretches out, and relaxes into the warmth and softness of the bed. Huge feather duvet, silk sheets, and thousands of pounds worth of custom-made mattress? Might as well make the most of it.

 

The master bedroom room really _is_ dark, as dark as it is in his memories. The windows are shrouded in huge, heavy, velvet drapes, embroidered with gold and silver thread. Fucking hideous things, but good for keeping the rest of the world where it belongs, on the outside. The only thing he can make out at all is the foot of the bed, the wooden struts and posts giving depth to the darkness, Mycroft’s tie draped over them, trailing across the sheets, visible as a flush of texture more than anything else, but it all serves to emphasise just how truly dark it is. Here in this plush, silent cocoon it could be midday just as easily as midnight.

 

Except that Mycroft is still asleep, and if Mycroft ever oversleeps it will constitute the first portent of the apocalypse, followed swiftly by rains of brimstone, eight-headed pit ponies, archangels wielding two-edged swords, the Thames running red with blood instead of brown with shite… Malcolm never did pay enough attention in Sunday School, but that all sounds about right. Then again, he’s already used the sodding keys of hell and death tonight, so why _not_ Armageddon outside the bedroom window?

 

Mycroft makes a soft little sleep-sigh. Malcolm glares at him across the pillows. It occurs to Malcolm that, just for the moment, his grand aspirations are finally true – he really is the most powerful man in the country, lying here next to a sleeping Mycroft Holmes with enough pillows to smother the smugness out of him for good. It would send the nation into _uproar_. Mycroft is a function as much as he is a person, and has been an institution of every government Malcolm has known - they certainly inherited him from the last lot in 1997 in more or less the same way that when you inherit a haunted house you suddenly belong to the ghost, not the other way around, and the ghost very much has its own agenda that you were not privy to until you had the deeds in your hands and the delivery men unloading your stuff in the driveway. There he’d been, in his office at No. 10, waiting to welcome the new Prime Minister. Government, Opposition, Coalition… Mycroft doesn’t even seem to notice a difference between the parties and would probably suggest there isn’t much of one in practical terms. _He_ is the hub of government. Everything goes through Mycroft Holmes at some stage, every policy, every decision, from the machinations of the Prime Minister and his advisors, of Malcolm himself – or his opposite number these days – of the ministers, _their_ advisors, the Civil Servants… nothing much happens without Mycroft’s slight-of-hand approval. He’s made himself indispensible by simply _knowing everything_. He’s omniscient, omnipotent, and occasionally benevolent. There was no government before him, because there can’t have been, and there won’t be one ever again after he’s gone back to the dust. It’s easy enough to believe. He was already the centre of the universe when Malcolm landed on Steve Fleming’s fledgling communications team, approximately four billion years ago, putting the dawn of Mycroft’s supreme but clandestine reign roughly half a billion years before life began on Earth. Jamie’s favourite description of Malcolm is _a jumped-up, ex-junkie, failed punk whose mammy never hugged him_ , which isn’t entirely true (his mother is an angel, shut the fuck up), but does go some way to explain why something as solid, eternal, and reliable as Mycroft could ever become such a central part of his existence.

 

Whether there’s any explanation for his more recent determination to asphyxiate the man, other than wounded pride, is debatable… but pride goes a long way, and Malcolm is not oblivious to how much of a cunt he can be when he’s irritable (or tired, hungry, bored, amused…). It’s just that, he remembers thinking Mycroft would be able to handle it; in the long run, he proved unwilling.

 

And yes – that is _still_ a fucking boot in the balls.

 

He’d subsequently forgotten – or perhaps subconsciously eliminated for his own mental health – just how incredible sex was with Mycroft. The man really was psychic. He could read Malcolm in a glance, know what mood he was in, what he wanted, where he didn’t know he needed to be touched. It helped a lot, given that their preferences and desires often conflicted in being too much alike. Mycroft would always find a way around it, and it also certainly helped that Mycroft liked things on a level of _roughness_ compatible with Malcolm’s natural inclination – that is, just about rough enough to need a safe word that could easily be tapped out in Morse code just in case someone’s mouth was too full to shout it.

 

Men of power, Malcolm has learned during his years in Whitehall, like having it taken from them in safe, controlled environments such as bedrooms (or carefully locked offices, or the backs of cars with smoked windows) so long as they are given it all back again afterwards. Mycroft had always been different to that. He was never just another man in a suit with a wife and kids at home, and he’s not like Jamie either, who he really can fuck one minute and tell to fuck off the next. Jamie always finds his way back, because when you build a relationship on triple-distilled lust and a mutual need for conflict there’s very little that can ultimately come between you.

 

Mycroft had never been that easy, and a lot of the time things had not been good between them, but even when they were bad it was… Well, it was the closest fucking thing Malcolm has ever come to having a… he _hates_ the word boyfriend, but there it is. _Partner_ is even worse. And that was exactly why and how he’d fucked it all up; they were that close to a transition from closely-guarded secret to an open, everybody-knows-but-nobody-talks-about-it secret, and his brain had short-circuited at the very idea. He’d fled like a rabbit from a field of burning chaff, which was fucking stupid considering he’d struck the match himself, that they were his own carefully laid plans to ease them from a life of secrecy to something acceptable and comfortable without going through the hideous media storm in between. He’d been a grand fucking _master_ back then, so sure of himself, so fucking clever… he’d never doubted he could pull it off, there were plenty of sympathetic journalists, and Mycroft’s was just obscure enough a name that they could glide through soundlessly, put themselves safely out of reach of blackmail or scandal, officially de-closeted but with the cultivated air that no one gave the faintest of fucks... It would have been flawless. No, what sent him tearing off with his white tail in the air were thoughts of what would come _after_ …

 

Men like Mycroft Holmes do not take rejection well. It was only – Malcolm had tried to brush it off – _implicit_ rejection, he was reading too fucking much into it, they could still carry on shagging, right? Obviously, right. So fucking _get over it_ , aye?

 

And that was about where the whole Malcolm-handcuffed-to-a-cupholder, back-of-sedan scenario came into things.

 

The point being, Mycroft was not generally an ambiguous man. Fucking him last night was not a good thing at all. That Mycroft had initiated it was a very, very bad thing. No, last night was some kind of _goodbye_ , the one they’d never had because Malcolm had been too drunk and furious the last time they saw each other to manage anything so coherent as a two-syllable word, though he’d managed a fair few monosyllabic ones if he recalls correctly. Goodbyes, with Mycroft, are not temporary things. This was definitely not a see-you-when-you-get-out-of-gaol fuck. If Malcolm knows fucks (and he does) then this one, this fucking _intense_ , mind-imploding, furiously impassioned fucking fuck…

 

He turns away, fully awake, though the clockwork in his brain tells him it can’t be any later than three-thirty a.m. Against all his better judgement, he’s considering ducking beneath the covers and rousing Mycroft with his mouth, which apparently he never did get enough of last night. It’d be better, safer, if he just fucked off now, just got up quickly and quietly, gathered up his clothes, and got the hell out of here. It’s what he should do, definitely, beyond a doubt, what he should…

 

Malcolm’s mother (why is he thinking about her tonight?) was an amazingly astute woman who had taken her eldest son aside the day he left for university and told him _I know and I don’t care and I promise never to tell your father, just for the love of God, please be safe_. Meaning the same thing she always told his hopeless sisters – if you’re going to sleep with a man, make sure you can at least trust him not to murder you and dump your body in a bog (the far more horrific and embarrassing AIDS conversation came a decade later, and he still cringes internally at the memory of that phone call not least because he’d had to tell his own mother he was the original rubber-Johnnie poster boy on account of other people’s bodily fluids, male or female, being severely _fucking disgusting_ ). Malcolm has the horrible sensation of having, after all these years, let her down. Turning him into the Tollund Man would not be an un-Holmesian way of making the problem of Malcolm Tucker, the man who had once told him to go and shove his cock in a deep-fat fryer and the current political thorn in his side, go away forever.

 

(He’s also still got dried cum on his thigh, though given tonight’s activities there’s no guarantee whose it is. Say what you like about him – no, really, say what you like because he’s scraping the bottom of the fucks-to-be-given barrel – Malcolm’s just content to be less of a prickly fucking tight-arse than he used to be.)

 

Ultimately, though, he knows Mycroft better than that. If he was planning to have him discreetly vanished, he probably wouldn’t even have waited for Malcolm to let himself in. Should Mycroft have decided to eliminate him he would be, by now, food for the wolves at Howlett’s zoo. So not a terminal goodbye, and not a political one because one of Mycroft’s little quirks is never, ever letting business invade his silk-and-velvet inner sanctum. The first time Malcolm had tried to talk about work in bed, he’d swiftly found himself sleeping in the spare room. The second time he wasn’t so lucky, locked out on the balcony wearing nothing but a shirt with a couple of buttons missing and feeling vaguely grateful (somewhere behind the incandescent rage) that it was summertime.

 

Which would make this a personal goodbye.  A final, see-you-never-again kind of goodbye. Mycroft is giving himself the closure Malcolm never granted him, and cutting him loose. That’s what it feels like. That is, undoubtedly, what this is.

 

Closure.

 

Well, then.

 

Malcolm feels carefully around the floor by his side of the bed (not that it’s _his side_ any more) for his trousers and fishes his blackberry out of the pocket. He hides the glow of the screen under the duvet and checks his messages. Two voicemails from Sam, hours ago now, the first ostensibly asking him to remember a meeting first thing in the morning but ultimately checking on him. The second, blatantly checking on him. She’s a good PA, but she’s got it into her head that he’s slightly madder than he actually is, and she’s been checking up on him a lot lately. There’s also a couple of tedious emails from Olly Reeder and a text from Nicola which begins _I’ve had far, far too much red wine tonight Malcolm but I just wanted to say_ \- and he definitely does not want to read the rest of that, so he switches the phone off and drops it back onto his pile of rumpled clothing. The light from the screen has completely fucked his night vision, so not only is the room now pitch black it’s also completely without depth or texture. The afterglow is a dull green-pink rectangular throb somewhere between the back of his skull and reality.

 

He turns, the sheets smooth and cool around him, and finds the other body in the bed with searching fingertips. That’s an elbow, but it guides him in. He pushes a kiss to the curve of a shoulder, to an arching collar-bone, to a delicate throat that flutters under his lips. Mycroft stirs a little, head tilting away, and Malcolm takes the opportunity to nuzzle into his neck as his wandering fingers brush against the nub of a nipple, graze against ribs, then back up, thumb finding nipple again, rubbing around the edge, brushing over, and it works just as Malcolm remembers, Mycroft’s eyes opening at the combined touch of tongue and fingertips. Malcolm runs his hand down from chest to hip, and Mycroft’s lips part, framing a question.

 

“Ah, shh,” Malcolm murmurs, kisses beneath his chin. “Just a wee something to remember me by.”

 

Mycroft smirks dreamily. Malcolm’s hand strokes his hip, brushes the inside of a thigh, which Mycroft moves, encouraging him, drawing his knee up and out. Malcolm pushes himself up a little, kisses Mycroft’s mouth, teeth tugging gently at his lower lip. Mycroft’s hand finds the back of his neck, pulling him in for a deeper kiss, a low moan rising in his throat as Malcolm’s hand finds its way between his legs, palming his balls, one exploratory finger pressing in behind. He can’t help it, he loves the involuntary little noise Mycroft always makes when touched just _there_ , but that isn’t part of Malcolm’s plan. He’s got a much better idea than that.

 

Malcolm shoves the duvet out of his way leaving them both exposed and naked, but far from cold. Mycroft pulls him in, kisses him, his mouth telling a thousand lies without making a single sound, but everything his arching spine says is the truth, his cock thickening in Malcolm’s hand. Once he has Mycroft gasping for air, Malcolm moves down the bed (pushing the other man firmly down into the pillows when he tries to sit up), and tugs Mycroft’s cock into his mouth. He could have lived a different life (wife? Kids?) if he’d never discovered, high as fuck one summer, the pleasure of this particular act.  

 

He feels oddly dirty doing this when he knows it’s a mistake, but it’s a feeling that, over the years, he’s learned to enjoy the same way he enjoyed sleeping in on Sundays in the years after he left home, the guilt chewing at his guts somehow intimate and pleasurable. The exact same feeling he discovered as a junior press officer decades ago, manipulating the media to say what he (or, back then, his superiors) wanted, a strange kind of illegitimate power that he’d learned to crave, and then to control. Part of controlling one’s power is knowing when _not_ to use it, and Malcolm is well aware this is one of those times, but… well, fuck it. That’s all, just fuck it. He’s done listening to his atrophied sense of right and wrong, and he’s done with his instincts. What he wants is a cock in his mouth (achieved) and then breakfast, a fry up, something to petrify his arteries (little place on the corner of his street, bacon that splinters when you bite into it, sausages blackened on one side, beans and chips and mushroom and toast for under a fiver). But before breakfast, something else…

 

He moves away, licks his lip, pinches Mycroft’s thigh when he grunts a protest. The bottle’s where they left it (where they always left it) on the bedside table, Malcolm finding it more by practised instinct than anything else. He then grabs Mycroft’s tie from the foot of the bed, and deposits both tie and bottle beside the pillow. Mycroft pushes himself up again, a hand on Malcolm’s hip pushing gently, giving him the chance to switch their positions, and yes, yes, Mycroft is ever the fucking _gentleman_ , but Malcolm bats his hand away and eases him back down into the pillows.

 

“Don’t you fucking worry, sweetheart,” he murmurs against Mycroft’s neck. A little shudder runs through Mycroft’s entire body as Malcolm straddles him, kisses him again. He finds Mycroft’s hands with his own and pins them to the bed, presses himself down chest-to-hip, finding some much-needed friction for himself, and he grins as Mycroft tries to tug free, wanting to touch him. He adjusts his grip, keeping Mycroft trapped as he moves back a little, shifts his hips, gets Mycroft – his hands, his arching neck, his straining feet, his thick cock – exactly where he wants him. This is good, this is really, really fucking good, for no other reason than that it _feels_ good. Malcolm rocks back, follows the fission of pleasure that runs up his spine, roots itself in his brain, the same volt of static that charges him when he wins a fight, when a broken minister finally acknowledges his word as gospel, the same fucked-up buzz of adrenaline that he felt the first time his father called him a fag, the last time he fought with the old man, and more recently, more intensely, when Jamie throws him against a wall… This is a moment, a pivitol fucking moment, but he’s above and beyond done with giving a shit now. He bites Mycroft’s shoulder, hard enough to earn a yelp of pain, pushes his hands down into the mattress, growls deep in his throat when Mycroft tries again to free himself, and finally reaches for the tie that he dropped beside the pillow.

 

He remembers buying the thing. Self-conscious, he’d never bought a fucking _gift_ for someone he was shagging before, nothing more than a can of Irn Bru anyway, and he’d stood in the boutique under the scrutiny of the poof of a salesman and pointed at this hundred-quid piece of shit in the display case. Blue, he’d thought, practical and safe. Blue silk tie, the most innocuous gift ever. Mycroft had worn it to official functions hundreds of times, stroked it and fiddled with it when he knew Malcolm was looking… the fucking degenerate wore it whenever he expected Malcolm might be around, and he’d worn it tonight, which meant he knew, he fucking _knew_ …

 

Malcolm kisses Mycroft firmly as he knots the tie around his left wrist. This isn’t new territory, in fact it’s practically vanilla compared to some of the stuff they came up with together in the early days, and tonight… well, tonight Mycroft will already have him down as having _control issues_ or some such bullshit. Suits Malcolm fine. He threads the tie through a couple of the bed-head’s posts and then around Mycroft’s other wrist, knotting it carefully. Next he picks up the lube and watches Mycroft watching him as he reaches behind and prepares them both, working quickly, giving himself a disproportionate amount of attention. Mycroft strains and wriggles, but Malcolm is good at knots, he’s not getting free if he struggles for the rest of the night. Though the wriggling itself isn’t what Malcolm would call a bad thing it’s not enough anymore; he gets a firm grip on the base of Mycroft’s cock and moves himself back and down and onto it.

 

Mycroft’s hips come up off the bed, his head thrown back, the bedframe creaking as he strains at his bonds. Malcolm leans back with his hands on Mycroft’s thighs mostly in an effort to prevent himself from getting knee-d in the spine but also helping keep Mycroft, who still has a firm weight-advantage, pinned to the bed. This is one of Mycroft’s favourite ways to fuck, but Malcolm is systematically removing all his reasons for that; normally Mycroft’s hands would be all over him, grabbing his arse, stroking his cock, trying to pull him or push him or set the pace himself… speaking of which, Malcolm keeps it slow, the agony of it etched it every line of Mycroft’s body, his hips twitching, his stomach muscles fluttering, his desperate little gasps of irritation… But Malcolm has him precisely where he wants him, the pressure in just the right place, and it feels good to keep it slow, to work himself into a state of exquisite pleasure, to take himself in hand and – with a desperate knee prodding the small of his back and Mycroft still keening in frustrated need – fuck and wank himself right to the very edge.

 

Only a very stupid person would suggest Mycroft is himself lacking intelligence, but sex does tend to distract and disarm him. Nevertheless, Malcolm’s running out of time because the whites of his eyes, wide in the darkness, tell him that Mycroft has twigged that something is not right here. And yes, okay, this is quite definitely one of his more petty, less refined plans, but he’s started so he’s got to fucking well finish it – he _wants_ to finish it, because sometimes it isn’t about the finesse or the cleverness, it’s about the sheer fucking satisfaction of a plan put into action, of one-upping someone, about bloody-well enjoying himself, fuck-you-very-much.

 

He strokes his own erection faster, keeping the rocking of his hips as gentle as he can bear it himself. Mycroft’s doing the best he can to fuck him, but it isn’t doing much good. Malcolm might be essentially composed of skin, bone, and distemper, but gravity counts for something and he can sort-of _clamp_ Mycroft down on the bed with his thighs tight against his sides, knees digging into his ribs. This plan might not have worked if he was ten years younger, but his stamina isn’t what it once was and all his has to do is flick his thumb in just the right way and he’s done, fresh cum streaking Mycroft’s chest, the bound man’s lips parting in a snarl of pure frustration.

 

“Malcolm-“

 

“ _Darlin_ ,” Malcolm drawls, dismounting, “you were wonderful.”

 

“ _Malcolm_ \- what- I need-“

 

“What’s that?” Malcolm slips off the other side of the mattress, flicks on the bedside lamp. Mycroft practically hisses, turning his head away, eyes screwed shut. Malcolm keeps his own eyelids closed for a few moments, then opens them cautiously. There’s not all that much to see. Just a naked, debauched, cum-splattered man with his hands secured (with a rather tasteful blue-silk tie) to a quite sturdy oak-framed bed.

 

“ _I’m not fucking finished!_ ” Mycroft shouts at him. He takes a breath, trying to calm himself. “Malcolm, I need you to come back over here and finish me. Use that singularly skilful mouth and-“

 

“Sorry, nope, anal and no condom means no blowjob, you know the rules.” Malcolm finds his shirt, underwear and trousers, shudders at the thought of getting dressed without a shower first, but he can’t risk that. Mycroft’s begging becomes increasingly frantic as he zips his fly, buttons his shirt, pockets his own tie, some of the things coming from the mouth of Mr Holmes decidedly delicious and ten years ago (okay, fine, maybe _twenty_ years ago) that would have been enough to get Malcolm hard again. There’s nothing more stimulating than having someone beg you to bring them to orgasm, but unfortunately Malcolm has entirely lost interest in everything other than reclaiming his personal space.

 

“Malcolm, _please_ -“

 

“I’m sorry, my hands are tied.” Malcolm grins like something that’s survived every global extinction event since the Silurian. “Oh no, wait a minute – that’s you, isn’t it?”

 

The last thing he picks up is his phone. It’s quite new and shiny, and not only does it have an in-built camera, it can also send photos by email or social media immediately after capturing them, assuming O2’s 3G isn’t down. He points the phone at Mycroft and for the first time does not regret the fact that he can’t figure out how to stop it making that irritating fake-shutter noise, because Mycroft has gone so pale and grey that he could successfully camouflage himself on a Dover cliff-face.

 

“Don’t worry. Just something for _me_ to remember _you_ , I wouldn’t dream of letting anyone else see you like this. Especially not your wee baby brother, hmm?” Mycroft is trying (tragically) to launch himself at Malcolm, who’s beginning to find everything really rather funny, from the expression of blind rage on Mycroft’s face to every plush, gold-embossed feature of this stupid, oppressively-comfortable room. He slips the phone into his trouser pocket, saunters over to the doorway, and leans there, feigning an expression of revelation, as if the idea has just occurred to him out of nowhere.

 

“Tell you what – if they find me innocent, I won’t send it to him, eh? And if they find me guilty, well, who the fuck knows how many email-addresses I’ll CC in my hard-liquor-and-Monster-Much fuelled delirium.”

 

“I don’t – Malcolm, I _can’t_ , it doesn’t work that way- fucking _untie me_ , Mal-“

 

“You _make_ it fucking work that way.”

 

Malcolm slams the bedroom door behind him and runs down the stairs, attaching the photo to an email as he goes. No point sending it to his own computer, because all that’ll happen is a couple of Mycroft’s fucking ninja-assassins will break in and make his hard-drive’s murder look like a suicide. Can’t send it to the office either, too many eyes (and actually he’d like to keep this to himself unless _absolutely_ fucking necessary), so better send it for safe-keeping to the last person Mycroft would expect. He addresses the email to Jamie MacDonald, and titles it “insurance”. Jamie’s a cunt, not a fool, and he’ll quickly figure out Malcolm took the photo in person, but Jamie’s jealousy has a tendency to manifest as impotent rage against any expensive objects nearby (Malcolm keeps a few ugly antique vases around the place just in case) followed swiftly by possessive and borderline-violent sex, which is more than fine by Malcolm.

 

He exits via the library, hitting “send” with one hand and grabbing the bottle of Talisker with the other.

 

It probably won’t work, Mycroft could talk his way out of this in a hundred different ways. There’s nothing illegal here, nothing actually incriminating, just a rather ugly, undignified, hilarious photograph that could chip away at his credibility. He can probably threaten anyone who sees it with worse, and there’s a good chance Mycroft would much rather see him go to prison for as long as possible after this. There’s also a not inconceivable chance Mycroft could just have him permanently silenced, but he won’t.

 

He won’t. Malcolm isn’t a fucking _Holmes_ brother, but can deduce this: Mycroft has had cause to invest in a whole shiny new wardrobe in the last couple of years, but he kept the tie Malcolm gave him more than a decade ago. Nothing overtly sentimental, not a photo or a fucking love-letter, but nonetheless – a reminder. He couldn’t bear to throw it away.

 

If the trilobite in his chest twitches in its carbonite tomb, Malcolm stamps it the fuck back down. He takes the last flight of stairs at a gallop and throws open the door, letting the cool night air rush in. He steps out, slams the door, and trots away down the steps, into the night.

 

It’s nothing sentimental, not a photo or a letter, and he’ll never again acknowledge its presence, but nonetheless, he keeps his key.


End file.
